


Brass Dollars and Penny Stamps

by Elsinore_and_Inverness



Category: Discworld
Genre: Discworld Apocrypha fic, Gen, Stamps, Vetinari as Patrician in the Colour of Magic, coins
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-21
Updated: 2020-06-21
Packaged: 2021-03-04 08:00:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 444
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24846442
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elsinore_and_Inverness/pseuds/Elsinore_and_Inverness
Summary: People tend to imagine rulers have complicated feelings about having their face on everyday transactional objects.By ‘people’ I mean Moist von Lipwig.
Relationships: Havelock Vetinari & Moist von Lipwig
Kudos: 28





	Brass Dollars and Penny Stamps

“Do you think me vain, Mr. Lipwig?” Lord Vetinari asked conversationally.

“You’re asking the man in the golden suit,” Moist said, although this was dangerously close to ‘takes one to know one.’

“Ah. A fair point well made.”

He had found the stamps. Moist von Lipwig was physically trembling with the certainty that Lord Vetinari had found some of the stamps on which an error in printing had caused Vetinari’s portrait to have grey in its hair. 

Vetinari took out an old dollar coin and spun it on the desk, then stopped it with his finger so the face side was facing Lipwig. “Do you happen to know, as master of the Royal Mint, if this is legal tender?”

Moist looked at the image on the coin. Presumably it was a portrait of a previous Patrician. The man was young, with round cheeks and a double chin. He wore a fur cloak and a hat like some kind of squashed tricorn. “I don’t see why not. They could hardly go around pulling money out of circulation every time there’s a new...” 

Vetinari had turned his head to one side like he was waiting for something. Moist looked back at the coin. At the hooked nose and the eyes that were cold and thoughtful, even pressed into metal. “That was you,” he said realizing. “It’s funny how people don’t really look at the pictures on coins. I thought you were always—“

“Thin?”

“Well, yes.” The date on the coin was the year Moist was nine. He remembered seeing iconographs of the rulers around the Circle Sea in the tent of a traveling “Joggraffy” teacher when he was twelve. Lord Vetinari had looked like the drawing on the tarot card the Quirmians and Brindisians called ‘the card with no name.’ What had happed to him in those three years? 

“Well, I wasn’t.”

Moist bit back the snide comment he was going to make about the younger Vetinari’s felt hat that looked like it had been pulled from the bottom of a costume trunk. “And there wasn’t anything wrong with that.”

“Likewise, there is not, in fact, ‘anything wrong’ with me having more grey in my hair than I used to have.”

Moist squirmed with mortification. People that actually knew Havelock Vetinari generally did not worry about treading around his ego. If you did, you were on the outside and you didn’t know how things worked. He looked back at the coin from twenty years ago. “Just one thing... _Rebus tuis consule_?” 

Vetinari smiled. The current coinage bore the mottos ‘labor omnia vincit’ and ‘quanti canicula ille in fenestra.’ The city had not always been so prosperous. 


End file.
